still in Ali’s purse.
“She couldn’t stand to throw any of them away,” Andrea continued. “When Detective Farris came by for the computer, I asked him if it was okay if I took the cards down, boxed them up, and saved them for her kids. He said not yet, that I should stay out of her office until they gave me the all clear. So that’s what I’m doing-leaving things as is.”
And that was how the office looked-as is. Files lay scattered here and there on the desk as though Reenie had just stepped out and expected to return to her work at any moment.
“Detective Farris took her computer?” Ali asked.
“He said he was looking for a note. He said if she wrote one it’s probably still out on the mountain somewhere and they haven’t found it yet. He thought she might have written it on her computer. I told him she wouldn’t have, that she’d have found a card-just the right one, too. I tried to tell Detective Farris that, but he looked at me like I was nuts, so I shut up.”
“She sent me a card that day,” Ali observed.
Andrea looked at Ali eagerly. “On Thursday? From Scottsdale?”
Ali nodded. “It was a cute card-a friendship card. She said she thought she was in for a bumpy ride. I don’t think she was talking about driving off a cliff.”
“That’s all she said?” Andrea asked. She sounded disappointed.
Ali nodded. “That’s all.”
“Maybe she was talking about Howie,” Andrea suggested softly.
“Howie?” Ali asked. “What about him?”
Chewing her lower lip again, Andrea stalled. “Nothing,” she said.
“Tell me,” Ali insisted
“I think she and Howie were having marital difficulties,” Andrea answered reluctantly. “She came storming into the office a couple of weeks ago and said, ‘Remind me again why I got married?’ And I said, ‘Well, you probably wanted to have kids.’ She shook her head and said, ‘Kids aren’t the problem. Husbands are.’ And then she came in here and slammed the door. Reenie wasn’t like that, you know. She didn’t do temper tantrums. She spent most of the morning on the phone that day. I know she made an appointment to see Mike Hopkins.”
“Who’s he?” Ali asked.
“An attorney here in town. He specializes in divorces.”
“She was going to get a divorce?”
Andrea shrugged. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I do know she made an appointment to see him. Then when the diagnosis came in, she canceled it. I guess she figured that with everything else that was going on, there wasn’t much point in going to the trouble of getting a divorce-that she’d just put up with whatever was going on for a while longer.”
“Do you know what was going on?” Ali demanded.
“It’s just gossip. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Tell me,” Ali prodded.
“I heard Howie has a girlfriend,” Andrea said in a small voice. “I think she’s one of his students.”
Out in the car, Ali could barely contain her outrage. Reenie had found out she was dying and that her husband was having an affair all at the same time. That was more than a mere “bumpy road.” She drove by the house on Kachina Trail on her way out of town. She wanted to confront Howie. She wanted to ask him whether or not it was true. Fortunately, he wasn’t home. Still. And maybe that was a good thing, she reflected, as she headed on down the road toward Sedona. Reenie was dead. So what if Howie was having an affair? What business of it was Ali’s? Besides, how much of the anger she felt toward Howie should have been directed elsewhere-at Paul, for example, for being a two-timing clod? Or at herself, for being stupid?
She was so distressed on the way back to Sedona that listening to Samantha screeching from the back-seat was a welcome diversion. Once back at the house, Ali stowed Samantha’s cat carrier in the corner of the living room and the litter box next to the washing machine in the laundry room. She filled the water dish and put that and the food dish on the kitchen floor. Leaving the door to the cat carrier open, Ali went to her computer.
For a long time, she sat with her fingers poised over the keyboard. There was a part of her that wanted to go off and lob incendiary bombs in Howie Bernard’s direction. But there was enough old-fashioned journalism still flowing in Ali’s veins that she couldn’t rant about something that was nothing really but unsubstantiated rumor, especially since it made no difference.
Finally, mastering her emotions, she forced herself to write something else.
cutlooseblog.com
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
My friend is dead. Two young children have lost their mother forever. Their lives are in total disarray. The children are with their grandparents who don’t even live in the same town. They’ve been pulled away from school, from their friends, and from everything familiar to wait for a funeral that will happen eventually, but at some unspecified time and place. (Funeral arrangements can’t be made until the medical examiner releases the body, and he has yet to say when that will happen.) In the meantime, their cat is here with me.
I don’t like cats. Never have. The idea of what I’m going to have to do with the litter box that is even now lurking in my laundry room is more than I want to consider-and probably way more information than you want to have, either. But the truth is, there wasn’t any choice. Sam (short for Samantha) had nowhere else to go. With their father preoccupied, the children needed to know that someone would look after their beloved pet. Since the kids are with their grandparents and since their grandfather turns out to be highly allergic to cats, that job fell to me.
Sam is not a beautiful animal. She’s huge. She’s missing an eye and a big part of one ear. (I would have thought that male cats did more fighting than female ones do, but maybe that’s the reality behind what men like to refer to as “cat fights.”) Even though I left the carrier door open, she’s still inside it and glaring at me through that one good eye. I don’t think she likes me any more than I like her, and I’m afraid once she leaves the carrier, she’ll disappear somewhere here in the house and I’ll never be able to find her again.
The kids had warned me in advance that Sam hated riding in cars. Now I believe it. The drive back to Sedona from Reenie’s place in Flagstaff only takes half an hour, but it felt much longer with Sam in the car because she cried the whole way. Make that SCREAMED!! AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS! It made me wonder how fifteen or so pounds of cat could make that much of a racket. I was afraid people in other cars could hear her, too.
I keep reminding myself that I came here to help. For today, taking care of Sam is what needed doing for Reenie and for her family. So, uneasy though Sam and I may be with our current arrangement, the cat is here.
My life is in almost as much turmoil at the moment as Sam’s. I seem to be getting a divorce, not because I necessarily wanted one but because I have it on good authority that my husband has not one but two girlfriends. Two! Maybe he picked them up at Costco. Isn’t that where you always have to take two of everything, whether you need two or not?
That would be his case-he didn’t really need them. Considering he already had a wife, me, I should have thought he didn’t need any girlfriends at all. But it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. For him.
It’s not a good idea for me, however, so I’m telling myself it’s probably time for me to move on. One of the two girlfriends is evidently busy telling everyone who gets near her about her plans to marry the man who is currently my husband. That being the case, I’ve decided to take the hint, get a move on, and let her have him. I’m not interested in sharing him and I certainly don’t want him back. If she does marry him, she’ll know in advance that he’ll be as likely to cheat on her as he did on me.
But at least I can move on. For me moving on is possible. With any kind of luck, I’ll be able to pick myself up (again), dust myself off (again), and see where the road of life will take me. My friend Reenie can’t do that. I don’t know everything that was going on in her life. I know she was having health issues. There could have been other stresses at work in her life as well. If there were, she didn’t mention them to me.
The general consensus, however, is that, for whatever reason, the burden of living had become too much for her. The authorities continue to search for a suicide note. As much as I don’t want to believe that my friend took her own life, I’m more than half hoping such a note will be found. I’m hoping that whatever is written there will offer both answers and closure for the people who are grieving her loss. That it will put an end to the speculation and help us understand why Reenie might make the choices she did-why she might choose to be gone when the rest of us weren’t nearly ready to let her go.
